Step One: Meeting People

I have three goals in my life right now: clean out the condo I´m living in, apply for my Spanish visa, and make friends. The first two deserve a separate post, so I´ll save them for another time. I am not naturally talented at making friends, unlike my nephew and my best friend. But I am a keen observer of social patterns and a project manager to the Nth degree. So I´m pretty good at making friends by following rules (that are research-based!). 

I figure that the first step to making friends is meeting people. My rules for this part are: (1) go to 2-3 group per week, (2) stay to talk to people afterwards, (3) accept as many invitations as I can, and (4) issue my own invitations. It has been challenging to find groups, as Gainesville is 1/20th the size of DC. But in my two weeks here, I have managed to start a weekly volunteer gig, attend several group meetings, and get invited to (and attend) two dinners at people´s houses. In DC I could find groups by searching Meetup.com and the Internet for my interests. Here it is working much better to just tell people I am looking to make friends, ask what activities they know about, and then get added to personal email lists. 

I know it will take time to actually make friends, because that comes from sharing experiences and knowing people well enough to reveal feelings and thoughts beyond the superficial. But simultaneously I know that the only way to make this happen is to show up and keep trying. I´m also working hard to maintain my connections to older friends in DC and other places, so that I don´t feel too alone during this transition. So far, I have met lots of interesting and welcoming people.  I am amazed at how nice people can be and also at how much energy I can spend on socialization when I am not using it for work purposes. Retirement has many benefits. 

The Sunshine State

So, I packed up everything I own, put it in my car, and drove away. I was surprised that it all fit, with room to look out the back window, no less. It was a trip filled with mixed emotions. I am feeling buoyant from owning so little and enormously sad at leaving all my good friends. 

Two days and 1300 km later, I arrived just in time for the late-season hurricane Nicole. I hurried to buy groceries and get everything safely removed from the car, but the hurricane ended up changing course so it wasn´t a big deal. We ended up with about 24 hours of rain, but none of the super-damaging winds. I´d complain about the lack of drama, but I appreciate having reliable electricity too much to complain.

I am living in Gainesville, a small city in north central Florida, mostly known because it houses the University of Florida. This is the smallest city I have lived in since my 20s and there´s already a bit of culture shock. Everywhere I need to go always seems to be a 15-minute drive from where I currently am. There aren´t all the kinds of shop I´m used to having available, and it´s looking difficult to find groups and meetups where I can meet new people to make friends in such a small city. It´s also definitely the south, but I am pulling on my experience from Savannah to remember that it is okay to greet people when you see them in the halls of the condo and to talk to strangers for no apparent reason. 

Just for fun, the last time I did something like this I was aged twenty-four, and I drove my 1988 Pontiac Grand Am to Albuquerque to work in my uncle´s restaurant. My cat Sundae is next to me in the homemade cat carrier, an awesome brainwave of my father´s, which meant I also had a useful laundry basket when I arrived. I lived on $7k per year and lived in a semi-scary apartment filled with cockroaches. Gainesville is looking much better in comparison.

An Empty House

I have said goodbye to the bats that swoop around my back yard each night. I have sold or donated almost everything I own (except for that cursed antique but broken 1930´s couch). And on Tuesday I got confirmation that the house sale had gone through. It ended up being harder to sell my house than expected, which was a combination of the state of the market and the state of my not-very-up-to-date house. I finish cleaning and packing today, and then I´ll have the rest of the weekend to hang out with friends and say goodbye.

I still remember how I felt when we drove away from DC in 2010, en route to my new postdoc job, passing the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials. I expect I will feel the same way when I drive (again) through the city on my way to Florida (again). I will really miss this city, with its combination of amazing and free museums, gobs of cultural events, and a significant international population. I find the climate here just about perfect, which would shock the people who think of it as a hot and humid swamp, because it has four distinct seasons and none of them are too long. 

This city is also full of friends. Friends who accompanied me through graduate school and who helped me survive Andrew´s death. And newer friends who weathered COVID with me and helped me enjoy the start of my retirement. Making friends does not come naturally to me, but having moved so much in my life means that I go at friend-making with a well-developed plan and research-based methods. So I cam confident I will make new friends, but also that that will take months.

In the meantime, I will focus on the many details of closing down a house, establishing a life in Florida, and starting the visa application process. I see many more to-do lists in the coming months, but they are all pretty exciting to-do lists.